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Shitake Tofu Potstickers w/ Scallions, Ginger, and Cilantro Recipe
April 26, 2003 | by Heidi | Filed under
rebar: modern food cookbook, Page 63
Let me just start off by saying, my stove (and the immediate vicinity of my stove) may take some time to recover from this recipe. There is a greasy film that now covers all four burners, plus a 3-foot radius of the range-including countertops, floors, cupboards, and me until I showered. The other thing I will say is, this is the loudest recipe I have ever cooked.
For those of you in the dark, potstickers are basically a round wonton-type wrapper filled with a bit of stuffing (sort of like a dumpling-but folded into a half-moonshape), then steam-fried, which I will talk about later. As you can imagine the options for fillings here are endless. You can use all sorts of things for dipping sauce as well. We had two-a simple soy sauce, and the left over peanut sauce from the chinese noodles with sesame-peanut sauce.
I was suprised to find two techinical mistakes in this recipe (my firsts!). The first one I found: the recipe tells you to put the dried shitake mushrooms in a bowl of boiling water for an hour, but then never tells you when to mix them in with the rest of the ingredients (I added them with the crumbled tofu). The other: the instructions tell you to use 'the oils' in the beginning of the recipe, so I used the vegetable oil, and the sesame oil -But then doesn't tell you how much oil to use when you go to steam-fry the potstickers (I used about 2T canola + a splash of sesame oil here).
Other than that the recipe was very straight forward. For those of you into tofu scrambles. The filling for these potstickers would make a great tofu scramble. Im not sure if that was the best consistency for a potsticker filling (I used extra-firm tofu) but have to wonder if I used a silkier, softer tofu, if the filling might have been a bit smoother. The filling flavor was good.
As I was saying before, this recipe utilizes a cooking techinique called steam-frying. I started off with a small amount of well-heated oil covering the bottom of my big pan, I added the potstickers (which is when the popping, and hissing, and spatering of the white hot oil began), I then let that side of them get golden brown. Flipped them, added a generous splash of water to the pan, and immediately put a lid over the entire pot to brown side #2. This steaming also added a nice soft moist skin on the parts which weren't browned and crispy.
Most people know hot oil + water is a nasty combination, if you aren't seeing and hearing anything impressive, your pan probably isn't hot enough. The minute the water hit the pan for the first time, I thought the entire pan might vaporize-I slammed the big lid on the skillet (per instructions), and it was like I had trapped a white demon inside. Most of the serious splattering happened after this point though (I would consider wearing long sleeve and gloves next time), as you have to check on the browning, and then remove your potstickers, and get the next batch going. Consider yourself warned. You can steam these as well, which I might try tonight with the leftovers.
These were delicious, and an adventure to make (other than the cleanup)-which reminds me...I went to a potsticker party once where everyone rolled their own (potstickers), with a variety of different fillings, and there were a bunch of different dipping sauces as well-fun twist on a dinner party where everyone has a chance to get their hands dirty.
To feature an actual recipe taken from a cookbook, it is best to request permission from the publisher or author. In the early days on 101 Cookbooks, I would tell people where to find the recipe, but not feature the recipe itself. Eventually I began to request permission to run the actual recipes, but this wasn't one of them. The majority of entries on 101 Cookbooks will have the recipes attached, this just happens to be one of the ones that doesn't. My apologies!
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